Professor

Affiliations

PhD Supervision Interests

I have supervised more than 25 PhD theses to completion, and I welcome applications in the areas of academic discourse, media discourse, environmental discourse, and qualitative research methods.

Research Interests

My best-known work focused on the social context of written academic texts, especially in science, treating such issues as politeness, cohesion, narrative structure, commonplaces, and illustration, drawing on frameworks from the sociology of scientific knowledge. More recent work has studied expression of opinions in talk, particularly in focus groups and consultation processes; the approach is largely through conversation analysis. I have written five books: Writing Biology: Texts in the Social Construction of Science (Wisconsin, 1990), Words in Ads (Arnold, 1994), Ad Worlds: Brands, Media, Audiences (Arnold, 1998), Matters of Opinion: Talking about Public Issues (Cambridge, 2004, and .Discourse of Blogs and Wikis(Continuum, 2010). See my blog on this topic at The Language of Blogs.

My current research, with Sofia Lampropoulou, draws on an ESRC-funded project on 'The Construction of Stance in Social Research Interviews'.

I edit the Elsevier journal Discourse Context & Media. I am also on the Editorial Boards of the journals Applied Linguistics, Discourse & Society, ESPecialist, Language in Society, Language Teaching Research, Science as Culture, Text & Talk, and Written Communication. With Ruth Wodak, I edit the John Benjamins book series Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society, and Culture.